Benjamin S. Petty
Senior Software Engineer & Founder · Seattle, WA · (206) 353-9874 · benjamin.s.petty@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/benjaminpetty · github.com/benpetty
Current Ventures
Audeos · Founder & Engineer · 2004–Present
Elixir · Phoenix · LiveView · Postgres · Oban · Cloudflare R2 · AWS · OpenTofu · Fly.io · Next.js · React
Audeos.fm is an online radio station running curated channels around the clock. I designed and built the realtime engine, the audio pipeline, and the site, and I run it in production. I DJ and produce music in Seattle, and I do live sound engineering and speaker rentals for events.
Northwest Local Cannabis · Co-Founder · 2021–Present
Astro · Sanity · TypeScript · Django · Django Ninja · Python · Postgres · HTMX · Stimulus · Chart.js · Fly.io
Licensed craft cannabis producer and processor. I co-founded it and own the technology: the public brand site and the internal operations platform the whole business runs on. Two vendor systems have no public API, so I reverse-engineered their internal backends to pull their data into the platform. I designed and upgraded much of the production facility and trained the grow team. I now run marketing, sales, distribution, brand and label design, compliance, payroll, and budgets.
The North West Clothing · Founder · 2001–Present
Shopify (Admin GraphQL) · Printful (REST) · Liquid · Vite · TypeScript · Alpine.js · Cloudflare Workers
Apparel brand I started in 2001, and the first software I shipped. I built its original online store myself, have been selling on Shopify since 2006 on custom templates, and have done most of the brand’s design throughout. In its first era it did up to $5K/day in online sales and up to $20K/weekend at events and festivals, and I ran all of it, from forecasting inventory to hiring and training staff across retail, warehouse, and screen printing. Relaunched in 2026 on Shopify with print-on-demand fulfillment, which I built and operate.
Rooted Community · Engineer · 2024–Present
Astro · Sanity · TypeScript · GitHub Actions
Built and maintain the website for a Washington nonprofit serving system-impacted BIPOC communities.
Engineering Experience
Independent Software Consultant · 2026–Present
Python · Anthropic API · Pydantic · pypdfium2 · Tesseract · Apple Vision framework · pytest
Records and document systems for a community association management firm. I built the tooling that answers a records request end to end: it establishes which documents were produced and which were withheld, indexes the archive so staff can search what they actually hold, and produces output that stands up as part of the legal record. A language model flags the questionable records, and code verifies every citation, matching quotes to real pages and checking each exported page against its source.
U.S. LawShield · Senior Software Development Engineer · Sep 2022 – Aug 2025
PHP · Laravel · React · Next.js · Docker · Kubernetes · AWS EKS · Helm · GitLab
Legal-services membership platform, sold as a separately regulated product in all 50 states. Three years modernizing it: I moved a monolith onto services without breaking the legacy API existing clients depended on, containerized the stack alongside the DevOps lead, and built the internal dashboard that support agents, attorneys, and executives all work out of.
Crowd Cow · Software Engineer · May 2021 – Dec 2021
Ruby on Rails · Vue.js · Redis · MySQL · Docker · Heroku · RSpec
Direct-to-consumer meat subscription. I took over recurring billing and raised subscription payment acceptance from 70% to 90% by matching retry timing to the reason each charge had failed. Also on call for site reliability.
Tomorrow Ideas (acq. Ethos Life) · Software Engineer → SDE II · Mar 2017 – May 2021
Python · Django · TypeScript · React · Redux · Node · PostgreSQL · Docker · AWS
Estate-planning app that generated wills and other legal documents valid in all 50 states, and earned its money selling life insurance alongside them. I joined as a contractor to lead the web build for the public launch and stayed four years, through a promotion to SDE II and the acquisition by Ethos Life. I worked across the document generation, the customer-facing product, and the internal dashboards the rest of the company ran on.
Instrument · Full Stack Engineer · Jun 2022 – Sep 2022
Docker · Node · WordPress · MySQL · GitHub Actions · WPEngine
Digital product agency. A three-month contract rebuilding the website for the nonprofit BlackSpace with the agency’s design and engineering teams.
Selected Projects
Self-directed, outside the ventures.
- crate-agent: macOS companion app for Serato DJ, in Swift and Rust. It keeps a DJ library intact when tracks are renamed or moved on disk.
- kraang: self-hosted personal knowledge platform on FastAPI, Postgres, and GraphQL, with an idempotent email-to-document ingestion pipeline.
Technical
Languages TypeScript · JavaScript · Python · Elixir · Ruby · PHP · SQL
Frontend React · Next.js · Astro · Phoenix LiveView · Alpine.js · Tailwind · SCSS
Backend & data Django · Phoenix · Rails · Laravel · Express · PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis
Infrastructure AWS · Cloudflare · Fly.io · Docker · Kubernetes · GitHub Actions · OpenTofu
Content & commerce Sanity · Contentful · Shopify (Admin GraphQL) · WordPress
Education
International Business & Trade, AAS · Highline College, Des Moines WA · 2018